Technology and Foreign Policy

Bruce W. MacDonald, author of the Council Special Report China, Space Weapons, and U.S. Security testifies before the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces and focuses on three questions: 1) Does U.S. overall space policy advance space security? 2) Does the United States invest resources so as to best protect and defend space assets? 3) What role can diplomacy play in advancing space security?

The Center for Strategy and Technology suggests that the Air Force continue to anticipate and develop countermeasures to emerging threats in order to proactively protect and dominate the cyberspace domain of the future.

Matthew Brzezinski, an author and former Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, and Roger D. Lanius, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institute, discuss the legacy of Sputnik fifty years after the Soviet satellite's launch.

Two missile-driven crises on opposite ends of the planet point up several realities about anti-missile technology: first, that nothing in current arsenals can counter them, and second, that the small, cheap artillery rockets fired by Hezbollah pose a far more difficult challenge today than complex ICBMs.

If Congress does not approve the U.S.-India nuclear deal, “it would damage the bilateral relationship,” concludes a new Special Report. Congress should adopt a two-stage approach: formally endorsing the deal’s basic framework, while delaying final approval until it is assured that critical nonproliferation needs are met.

Bryan Cunningham and Jeff Jonas discuss the pivotal role of technology in support of U.S. intelligence, as well as the importance of understanding these technologies and their implications for policy. Topics include intelligence sharing networks, anonymization, data mining, and civil-liberty concerns.